KPFK. Hollywood. 2014

Homonormativity is a virus. Bauer. Gscene Magazine. July 2014

Homonormativity is a virus     July 2014       GScene Magazine

 Hang on, what’s all this about using wet wipes on homos? Agh. According to research somewhere in Eastern England last month (or the month before, sometime), the heterosexually defined needed to cleanse themselves when they were in any contact with a homosexual. Why didn’t I think of that? Because, maybe we are of the same filth.

Let me explain, firstly, I’m not at all knowledgeable in any of this. I lied myself though one degree and bought my PhD online from the University of Throckmorton, Texas (best $300 I’ve ever spent). What I can gather in between bumps of K, is that a few spotty straight identifying teenagers were asked for their reactions if they had to borrow a phone from a gay man and they said they’d rather wipe their arse with it. And? Then some Spanish students were asked would they rather accept a pencil or a Wetwipe in the same circumstances. They chose to wipe.

I still have a problem with, for example, Latin cultures and the proliferation of anti-gay sentiment through the Christian scriptures handed down by closeted priests to underpaid and overworked parents. My parents were almost the same but northern white-trash Catholics. I’m sure, like my parents, they thanked god daily that both school and the church (which were comingled) existed so that they could get the kids off their hands and earn some money to feed the little sods. They had no thoughts about social complexities and homophobia, they assumed that their kids were straight because they themselves had never met anyone gay.

Then some Polish students were offered the same test and, front to back, wiped away. Ditto the above but now with the political ataxia of communism thrown in. Yet another ‘Homophobic’ doctrine tossed at parents who have missed the modernist boat of social reform. Probably this is why their children are choosing a British education in the first place.

"Metastasizing through the rhetoric of their leaders into the ears of children"

It seems pretty inconclusive on a conscious level; the parent cultures embedded identities in political doctrine and the church - despite any heteronormatvity or homophobia thrown in - have influenced their own children’s fear of the queer. Nothing else. Metastasizing through the rhetoric of their leaders into the ears of children.

As a sometimes fellator, sometimes drug-fuelled top, sometimes prizewinner in local Macramé contests, I will not take any of this seriously. After all, I’m sure most of these badly-formed students who are rich enough to leave their motherland for a cheap English education, are in for a rude awakening. Losing that deep entrenched primitivism is bloody hard work. I know it; I come from a good, solid British working-class culture whose parents never read a book and a place where a hippie told me not to say the ‘N’ word when I was fifteen.

When it comes to issues of contracting HIV from phones and toilet seats, actions speak louder than words. I’ve snogged all of my positive friends, even when HIV didn’t have a name. And let’s face it Diana kissing the AIDS patient did more for the love and care of the ‘soon to be dead’ than any of Thatcher and Saatchi’s AIDS campaigns ever did. Any studies around this are moot. In the so-called, most 'primitive' societies of central Africa with all the western strangulation of expensive medication, they have no choice but to use the same equipment as the dying. These messages are still sent through idiot parents, cultures, religions and political doctrines, where the homophobic slurry still seeps.

I think the most fascinating theory, the reference for which I’ve got written on a Post-it near the cat tray and can’t be arsed to get at this point, is that gay men collectively think we’re all a bit 'ikky'. Gay men will always think that, we love it. The one remaining right we have is that we can be judgmental and laugh it off. I know groups of gay men who pay handsomely for some of the ’filth’ that we are supposed to do to each other. No social meaning involved. And some of them don’t even wash their hands afterwards before calling for pizza.

As Bifuria D’sconza recently said, “When everyone realised it’s white, straight men that have screwed up the planet; everyone else - faggots and clown faces too - grouped together to knock those assholes down. Sista - Homosexuals ain’t the problem. White, male, bankers are. And the governments that feed them too. I thought everyone knew that. Where you been livin?”

Some friends of mine just love waking up in their own vomit after being dragged, face down out of Legends at 3 AM.  They go back again and again and who can deny, what is to them, such an important part of their identity. How many times have I ended up in a piss club and sobered up with the texts from friends the next day calling me all the dirty scrubbers under the sun? How many times have I just laughed at such filth and got on with my daily, unconscious homo existence. We don’t scorn ‘filth’, we accept it. Because, as Lola once said, ‘that’s just how we are’.

Filth, like homosexuality, is not a mutable platform for the degenerates and there is no way we can bend – whether the Nazis are pounding at the door or not. To suggest that we can change decries the fact that all those queers killed in the Holocaust had some form of choice in the matter to 'man up.'

Here we have spelled out what homophobia isn’t. It’s not about gender policing or anything else. It’s about getting rid of essentialism within political doctrines and religions spewed from the primitive masses and the conservative men (hang on, they’re the bankers aren’t they?) and replacing it with homonormativity, its’ sworn sister.

Twitter: @charliebauerphd

Print version of this document 

The Tranny Pack. Gscene Magazine. June 2014

The Tranny Pack. Charlie Bauer PhD. Gscene Magazine. June 2014 

Fever rages in the US about Trans terminology on RuPaul's TV show, 'Drag Race.' Again, and I bleat on about this ad infinitum - it all comes down to the language. I mean to say - even the title is a direct association with macho culture. Now there's subversion at work.  

I say again, I can chose to say that I’m a dirty, stinkin,’ rotten, filthy homo (because I am). Jaysus - even my friends call me this. But if someone else called me it in the street? Hmmm. Well, I’ve realised by now that they only want a reaction from me, so I just shove my pudenda high and head off along my way. But sometimes it’s different. In that scream across the street, there’s usually a morsel of hatred. If you respond, then you open up the (usually violent) conversation that ensues. If you’re alone, vulnerable and/or off your face, it can get very nasty, very quickly.

Before the big homogenization of the LGBTQI… culture that happened as result of HIV and AIDS - in my hometown, at least, it was common for women to be referred to by gay men as ‘Fish’. I’m not getting into any prosaic reasons why this could be, other than to say it was yet another barrier in the breaking down the terminology of the closet.

And we’ve always reclaimed words, the fact that RuPaul chooses to do that in mainstream media is a debate within itself. The fact that a Black Trans person is up there and accepted within mainstream cultural media, surely goes somewhere to answering the visibility question. Misogyny towards Trans women exists and is still very real, but this is not that, so put down that claw-hammer for lord’s sake.

As you know, again old-fashioned of me, but I’m a big fan of contextualization. And Vaudeville. And RuPaul is modern Vaudeville. She’s that wonderful intertext between the mainstream and the street. That humor that surrounds us and is aimed back at ourselves, is only received from a point of privileged power. As a matter of note, take a look at the way Jewish humor works - the most sophisticated humor on the planet, yet never taken literally. Even an old goy like myself is in on those jokes. Whoops – I’ve mentioned it – humor – that dirty word, again.

RuPaul has only ever exploited RuPaul. RuPaul has not changed gender as she has become famous to gain a wider audience. RuPaul still isn’t compromising. The battles for Trans people to be here are hard fought and hard won and RuPaul had that same fight. A fight that was started when the, then lowest common denominators, - the drag queens and the whores - pushed back on June 29^th 1969 at The Stonewall Inn.

Granted, nothing has been helped by the freak show/drag show of daytime television but the community has not been put back by the mention of the word Tranny and She-male on American Telly, sorry, television. Granted, this terminology was generated within the heterosphere, but it has also been used as an internal tool by the ideological separatists in the name of everyone else within the acronym. No-doubt the same separatists that won’t consider self-identifications such as ‘Drag Queen’ or ‘Cross Dresser’ to be included within the Trans umbrella. But this rigidity about who is Trans and who is not fails everyone - Trans being a point of movement and not necessarily a final destination.

So, just to get this straight, lots of people are included within the capital T of the acronym. Gender bender/drag/occasional cross dresser. Straight boys who dress as women, aren’t ridiculing, subverting or kidding anyone, neither are they being disrespectful to the Trans (or female) community. And I’m sure what begins as fun soon changes into something altogether more liberating for some of these men. Anyone who expresses gender differences and fluidity are surely welcome here. Anyone, for whatever reasons and for whatever period of time. Sorry to all concerned but the closet is open for business.

In May 2012 I wrote an article about my meeting with Trans man in Invercargill on the southernmost tip of New Zealand. His partner was in the northern Island but he chose to stay in the frozen south. He told me about the Whakawahine (3^rd gender) within the Māori and Samoan cultures. Cultures who both respect and honor the Trans people within their communities where they stand alongside warriors.  In the west, the war paint is somewhat different.

I also remember an episode that took place in South Wales in the early hours of October 3^rd, 2009. Drunken Dean Gardener and Jason Fender taunted a pair of cross-dressed men who were walking along the street in wigs, short skirts and high heels. When bare-chested Gardener threw a punch, one of the men landed two lightning quick blows, rendering Gardener and Fender unconscious in under 30 seconds. The cross-dressers regained their composure, linked arms and wandered off again into the night.

The police were eventually called and all concerned were, of course, arrested including the cross-dressing cage fighters the straight boys chose to pick on that night.

The verdict? Gardner and Fender were tagged and given community orders as a result of their Trans-phobic aggression, while the cage fighters walked free. And nobody mentioned the fact they were dressed as, or identified themselves as women.

www.soundcloud.com/thewholeworld

Interview with Don Bachardy. Charlie Bauer PhD talks about love, Isherwood, praise of older men and love letters

The public cost of private health care. Gscene Magazine. May 2014

AIDS IS DEAD! Bauer. GScene Magazine. April 2014.

AIDS IS DEAD!

This is an unpaid advertisement

A great sadness is upon us.

It’s official. Aids is no more. It has no life. It means nothing. Zilch. A waste of time. The debate is over. Even the acronym needs a well-needed once-over. But it’s already too late. Who wants to know about this anymore? Who cares? We’re devastated.

Thank the lord above, we’ve now moved on from HIV and AIDS. The money just isn’t in it anymore. It’s a lousy investment. Like Detroit with cars, or the UK with higher education, the ass has well and truly fallen out of the industry.

I’m not suggesting that we, the drug companies, are placing anything else into the sexual activity market. God forbid. But we have a new buzz-word that we’re all really getting off on back here on campus. We click our fingers, wink and point to each other in the corridors; high five each other at the urinals, whispering the new name on everyone’s pension cheques – HEP C. Even the sound on the lips makes our grandkids bank account soar.

We’re not sorry about the HIV community – how could we be  - Hello! you sent our kids to summer camps and Ivy league universities for nearly thirty freekin’ years! Then you stupidly began to live, and we had to limit our store accounts and Lexus leases. But we’re not bitter. Although, I sometimes wonder why we should show you any sympathy when we actually saved your lives - yet you still talk about us so bad? But we know what forgiveness is. Here, we don’t believe in bitterness – it’s all just too negative. Sometimes it’s hard not to believe that we’re truly blessed.  

As with all new epidemics, we’re really excited about our new products. 

As with all new epidemics, we’re really excited about our new products.

I’m happy to say that, with the patent now securely in place, we look forward to the happy global proliferation of HEP C.

Unfortunately, as was not the case with HIV, we have a timeline on this one. I know - you can’t have everything! HIV was fantastic for us because nobody could see an eventual control or cure, and of course, when something heaven-sent like HIV happens, its time to install that new pool and grab a new car in anticipation of a LONG pay day. HIV was the ‘gift’ that just kept giving - you can imagine our office parties when those new figures were announced... but as we all know, good times don’t last forever.

OK, let’s not delay you any longer - here’s the deal.

What we’re offering is only a one-off deal. Yes, I know you only need to take the medicine once to clear HEP C, but our marketers tell us that you guys LOVE an offer in the middle of the recession! On top of that - this just gets better and better - we’ll give it to you at a cut price if you get tested NOW and order the medicine within the next month!

If not completely satisfied with our product, we will refund ALL yes ALL of your money, no questions asked. For a one-off payment of $49,990 we will deliver you from the evils of HEP C forever. Now isn’t that a small price to pay to keep fucking? We’re giving you a full $10 cash-back incentive on the price we’re charging per-person for the cure! Now who says we’re not fair!

As always there are drawbacks, at this point it’s only going to be rich white people who can access this medicine – I mean, we are a business after all – do the math! But there’s no need to despair - by the time the rest of our ever-growing HEP C community gets around to financing, after all of those nasty side-effects seep in over time -we’ll be doing the unimaginable. You ready? We’re step-financing ALL, yes ALL, of the medications needed for those long term side effects as HEP C develops. Now come on, you can’t get fairer than that! In other words, we’ll help you pay for the worsening illness until you can afford the cure! Christ, it’s no wonder we feel like god sometimes…

As a caring pharmaceutical company we believe strongly in assisting the poorest diasporas struggle through this awful, dreadful disease. And we don’t dangle carrots either– the cure is available to EVERYONE. Come on - you can’t say fairer than that!

Our success is based on our ongoing and passionate conversation with god. Why we have been chosen to be the earthly representatives of the sick and the lame we have no idea, but we feel truly privileged that we are. We know it’s a question that Jesus himself asked his own father on top of that chilly mountain. We can only thank goodness that we don’t have to die in order for everyone else to live in these times - we can take installments instead! How could we ever live with ourselves and call us a human interest corporation, otherwise!

When that dreadful Judas told Jesus to pull in the purse-strings and give to the poor, Jesus let him know the deal. ‘There will be poor always. Always struggling, ’ he said.

Well guess what? We are going to help the struggling poor with what we call, ‘The One Payment Step Closer to Thee’ plan. Thee, in this case is that all-important cure at the end of all your suffering. Next we’ll be raising the dead!

And because we operate from our own campus, it means that all you lepers will remain outside!

Just one trip to your GP or medical centre organizes all!

Now, you can’t say fairer than that!

Sochi Homo. Bauer. GScene Magazine. March 2014.

This statement was forwarded to be read out at the opening of the Winter Olympics at Sochi, 2014.

 Sochi Homo

Ask yourself - what really holds Queer culture back?

We do. We do because of our continuing lack of acceptance of the ‘normal’.

We just don’t trust the ‘normal’. More importantly, we may have nothing in our pockets, but we will never allow ourselves, at any point, to be just ‘normal’.

Equality is not sought by us, nor is it an end result. So, no gifts please - we want no acceptance - because it now seems that we’ve been right all along. What we are transcends the thousand barriers of race and class and gender because we're everywhere and always will be. And we haven’t worried ourselves to traverse those difficult situations, we’ve ran at them screaming. We’re the ones who have chosen to walk alone down those dark alleyways. And we’ve been granted no permission whenever it’s been sought.

We’ve come through reams of litigation and condemnation and will again and again and again. And we will still laugh in the face of any contrition, because we can’t promise not to do any of it again - to any of your judges – in fact, we will do it again, but next time it will be bigger and louder than the night sky in a hurricane.

And we’ll rise and fall and not worry because of the stars that surround us, our chosen families that flicker away and die all too soon. We refuse to count our blessings, be contrite and play tic-tac-toe on the steps of your churches. Or to be ‘strong’ again, when you’ve already decided not to listen.

“What we are, transcends the thousand barriers of race and class and gender because we’re everywhere and always will be…”

So, we don’t accept your acceptance, nor do we seek the breadth or creed of your forgiveness. Because we do not need forgiveness from anyone. That has to come from you, for yourselves. That has to come from the conscience of those who’ve beaten, ridiculed and chided us for thousands of years. Those who’ve denied us our real, dear families, those who’ve hijacked our deaths and begrudgingly complied with the normalcy of our new weddings. Ask yourselves; is this forgiveness? Should we lean on your one heart with the weight of millions who came before us and who stand alongside us right now?

I bring my pain with me to the table, a pain so great and long-lived that it still stirs the soul and the belly of my being. I bring on the faces of the young dead from my own past, the real warriors of a filthy bloody war we all went through together. And the women, who ran to the aid of their broken brothers and created a single voice that’s still screaming out today.

So, go with all your fabulous sins, my brothers and sisters, and real joy will be sure to follow you. I love those who run to that slippery edge in a game of kiss, dare and death. I love those who subvert the very sex that’s supposed to define them. I love those who love me back simply because of love itself and I love those who keep loving, when loving has long passed.

And those who know where normality ends and reality begins. The kids who put whatever they have into in a flimsy sack and find a way to leave their early families behind. And to falter over and over again and never stop faltering until they die, because those are the follies that make us. The mettle that binds us in every sea of no fucking hope. The glue that never separates us from the reality of our life and death experience. The fear that sometimes keeps us separate from each other, yet brings us together when the knives go down. The strength to draw from all history because we know that all history is really ours; that we’ve peppered the changes on those dull old maps and coloured the weave of every creative stroke. These changes made, because not to reminds us only of regret - that building stone of our lives that we’re never allowed to shed.

The pathways to our worlds remain open but shackled. The roads are still wide but populated less. But we have shown over and over the power of our steps and grown steadily - supported only by the very best. Can we really give away this life of ours - a history so rich within us all? Can we not falter and have to watch our backs at every life event, lest it be normalized and given the so-called protection of a society that has proved itself so wrong?

To sacrifice our otherness is to walk with passing strangers, to lose the trust we’ve known to share. Because that otherness is our only identity. It’s that one within a crowd that refuses to be accompanied, or the voice that will be heard - but only by a few. Will they kill it off with persecution again? Will they succeed in changing us into what they really think we are? Will they keep trying when they have failed so many, many times before?

It’s time to stop history, dead. What’s happened up until now happens no more. The door has been closed for the very last time. So, don’t rejoice or ‘permit’ us - we reject all of that. Instead, look to yourselves and in there, see who we are. Then, look out to the world and see who has made it glow for you.

Go on, we dare you - look out into the world.